- Company Name
- Sainsbury's
- Job Title
- Principal Software Engineer
- Job Description
-
**Job Title:** Principal Software Engineer
**Role Summary:** Lead architectural vision and technical delivery for scalable, secure digital and payments software at a high‑volume retailer, driving innovation, quality, and cross‑team collaboration.
**Expactations:**
- Exhibit visionary leadership by shaping technology standards while fostering inclusion and collaborative decision‑making.
- Own critical system design, performance, and reliability across front‑end and back‑end services, ensuring alignment with cloud, AI, and data‑analytics best practices.
- Act as a catalyst for continuous improvement, mentoring peers and scaling modern engineering practices.
**Key Responsibilities:**
- Architect, design, and review large‑scale, highly available systems using ReactJS/Next.js, Java, Spring Boot, Kotlin, and Kafka.
- Champion secure, customer‑facing solutions, integrating AI tooling and analytics to drive product innovation.
- Facilitate cross‑functional design discussions, encouraging diverse input and leading teams through complex technical decisions without formal authority.
- Define, enforce, and evolve quality assurance, testing frameworks, and performance engineering practices.
- Own monitoring, alerting, and reliability strategy using tools such as New Relic, ensuring incident response and continuous service improvement.
- Mentor staff and senior engineers on design patterns, prototyping techniques, and cloud‑automation best practices.
- Promote an inclusive culture that actively seeks diverse viewpoints and enables all team members to contribute.
**Required Skills:**
- Deep experience in full‑stack development (front‑end: ReactJS/Next.js; back‑end: Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot).
- Proven expertise in distributed messaging (Kafka), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), automation, and reliability engineering.
- Strong grasp of AI integration in software workflows, including tooling, justification, and implementation.
- Ability to drive system‑wide technical discussions, wire up monitoring, and guide performance optimisation.
- Excellent communication and influence skills; comfortable mentoring and facilitating collaborative decisions without formal authority.
- Commitment to clean, maintainable code and adherence to design patterns, QA, and testing practices.
**Required Education & Certifications:**
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (advanced degree preferred).
- No mandatory vendor certifications required, but AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Certified Developer, or similar is advantageous.